This qualitative dissertation explores how the principal's leadership roles build capacity for change and how chaos theory contributes to this understanding. The roles studied include distributive leadership, moral leadership, social justice leadership, democratic leadership, and instructional leadership. The tenets of chaos theory examined…

It was not known how 12 full-time public high school interscholastic athletic administrators in southeast New York explained and described how professional mentoring and collaboration influenced their leadership skills. Bandura's social cognitive theory provided the theoretical framework for the study. A purposeful sample was drawn from a…

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of women high school principals to uncover challenges contributing to the underrepresentation of women in secondary school leadership. Moreover, this work is situated within the larger movement of educational leadership for social justice, with a focused application of a…

The purpose of this portraiture study is to describe four African-American principals' experiences, in the context of their principal's role, with the interventions they championed in meeting the needs of their struggling students. This research attempts to answer questions concerning: What role did the four principals play in the targeted school…

The purpose of this study was to identify factors that contribute to teachers' career longevity. The study gives voice to nine experienced teachers to help understand the challenges these teachers faced, the satisfaction they obtained, and the opportunities that allowed them to remain at one school for ten years or more. I use the lenses of…

In this qualitative study of public high school athletic directors (ADs), the experiences and contacts of eight White ADs (four men and four women) that influenced their ability to attain (achieve) and retain (maintain) the AD position are examined, compared and analyzed, with a specific focus on gender. Specifically, this study examines the…

Attrition is a problem among special education teachers in an urban high school in a southern part of the United States. A high school special education department served as the local setting. The department was unique due to a high teacher attrition rate and high percentage of teachers with less than five years of teaching experience. The purpose…

School climate is a significant way to predict school achievement as a positive correlation to students' standardized test scores and also teachers' perceptions of bureaucratic effectiveness and empowerment (Hoy, Tarter & Kottkamp, 1991; Sweetland & Hoy, 2000). Enabling bureaucracies are positively related to teacher empowering; however,…